Small Improvements

Crossing the $1m per quarter

I’m very proud to announce that our first quarter 2017 has been amazing! Our Q1 revenues jumped to $1.2m (24% better than last year), and just in time for our 6th company birthday we crossed the $10m mark for historic sales.

It has been quite the ride since our first $3600 USD check back in April 2011!

Numbers in more detail

As you can see on our two default financial slides, our company revenues are quite seasonal, but the overall trend of payments received per quarter is going up.

What’s not going up is the total number of paying customers. We’ve enacted minimum pricing that’s keeping many of the smaller potential customers out, while existing smaller customers are churning. Small Improvements is a great solution, and it can work fine for companies of just 15 or 20 people (like us!), but for most companies the threshold for successful deployment (and team members to back it up) is beyond 50.

This means we’ll hopefully see new growth over time, but right now we’re going through a bit of a valley there.

As always the MRR chart has the far stabler line:

And our trend towards serving larger clients over time is quite visible on the Revenue per Unit (Customer) chart too. In early 2014 our average customer earned us $300 USD per month, while today we’re approaching $425 per customer.

Team growth

Numbers aside, we keep on rocking on the team level too. We had 4 new starters in Q1: Jeremy and Kelly in Marketing, Olga in HR, Paulo in Design. At the same time, we said goodbye to Stephan who obtained a work visa for Canada, and to Alison who set out on a sabbatical. You’re both being missed dearly!

Slightly outside Q1, Sharmeen started in Development on April 1st, on April 15th we’ll get serious about product management with Jenny taking over a lot of work from me. In June Adrienne will join us as a second PM.

All combined, we’re now at 25 confirmed staff by June, and we’re also interviewing and in negotiations with quite a few more people. Our Mission 28 will hopefully be complete by the end of the Q2!

In more detail, and slides

From a product perspective, I couldn’t be happier either. We spent the first half of Q1 doing a lot of spring cleaning. Behind the scenes, several major features and overhauls went from alpha to beta, and those will launch in early Q2. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but we’re also adding a fifth module soon, and revamping one of the existing modules entirely.

We’ve been ramping up our marketing efforts as well. We’ve gotten a lot more structured and successful on inside sales and customer success, and our support team keeps working perfectly despite its lead being on paterntity leave.

You’ll see a lot more detail about how we work on the following slides. We’ve moved to a weekly all-hands meeting without slides, and once every 6 weeks or so we go the extra mile and create slides as well. The following are not focused on this particular quarterly update, but they do give a good overview of what we’ve been up to the past 6-8 weeks.